THE PLAGUE YEARS REVISITED: Most of us pre-geezer Baby Boomers remember waiting in line in the 1950s for Jonas Salk's polio shots or, later on, Dr. Sabin's vaccine-laced sugar cubes. Our aged parents recall the polio panics in the 1940s and 1950s. A child might arrive home complaining of a stiff neck or sore legs. This once-lively child could be paralyzed and bed-ridden days later, dead by the end of the week. Polio outbreaks arrived in summer, and affected the middle-class kids as much as – sometimes more than – the kids who lived on the other side of the tracks. David M. Oshinsky revisits those not-so-good-old-days in Polio: An American Story. An odd, but fascinating, choice for summer reading. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, a private non-profit formed in the 1930s with President Roosevelt’s help, initiated the race for a polio cure. The Foundation invented relentless fund-raising in The March of Dimes, techniques that have since been expanded into modern-day media extravaganzas such as the 24-hour MDA Telethon. Unassuming guys in lab coats, medical “nerds,” were thrust into the media spotlight. The book excels in recounting the cutthroat race for the polio cure. There are grisly tales of experiments on monkeys, and then on unsuspecting institutionalized children. Oshinsky recounts how the fears about polio fed into the greater Cold War paranoia. The National Foundation conducted the first massive human tests of the Salk killed-virus vaccine in spring 1954. Media excitement about the vaccinations edged out other major stories: the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling on civil rights, the Army-McCarthy witch trials, and the fall of Dien Bien Phu. National Foundation Director Basil O’Connor insisted the human tests be conducted without U.S. Government funding which he said was part of a “Communistic, un-American…scheme.” Typical fifties rhetoric. But all part of Oshinsky's all-American tale. The Bookslut site has a less flattering review. Oshinksy's publisher is Oxford University Press. QUESTION: What are you reading this summer? Thrillers? Sprawling epics? Disease tales? Poetry? Big-fat-novels for beach reading? Let me know and I’ll make an unscientific wyolitmail summer reading list.

- posted by Michael Shay @ 3:38 PM